Evernote Hackathon Brazil
By Douglas Drumond
Last weekend (Nov 10–11), Evernote held the second edition of Evernote Hackathon Brazil. It was my first 24H hackathon and it was very exciting. I had participated in two hackathons before, but the doors were shut down at night.
The trip
The hackathon was held in São Paulo city at Academia Wayra, a startup incubator located in a very cool building with a nice view. It was the first time Pinheiros river looked nice. Edited: fixed river name.
I live in Campinas, approximately 100 km from São Paulo. I had agreed with a friend to go by car and split the fees (gas, toll and parking, the latter being the most expensive), but, fortunately, Unicamp (my alma mater) provided a bus (for free! YAY!) for Campinas participants.
People said the driver got lost in São Paulo (this isn’t uncommon), but I don’t know, I just remember turning on some music on my phone and a friend calling me: “wake up, we arrived.”
Reception
After getting the badges, we went upstairs to the floor where it the hackathon would take place and we met Luis Samra, from Evernote, who introduced us to Julien Boedec, also from Evernote. These guys are very fun, I felt completely at home talking to them. Talk about that later. There were a bunch of tables, we could choose anyone. In fact, this was the workplace of the startups incubated at Wayra. Inspiring, isn’t it? So, I set up my hackathon startup with my friend Suelen and it was time for breakfast.
The food
The food were hackathon-kind of food. Cheese bun, sandwich, juice, soda, coffee all day long and pizza for dinner. Evernote wasn’t cheap, there were tons of food and quality was nice. Red Bull and beer for free as well (it surprised me nobody got drunk).
Gadgets
Samsung provided 12 Galaxy Note 10.1 and some Galaxy Cameras. Although I found the idea of a camera running Android quite cool, I didn’t have enough time to fiddle with it. There was one group that used it to do image recognition app (if I recall correctly, this was the group that won second prize).
On the other hand, I played a lot with the tablet. I own a 1st gen iPad, and I’m used to its response time (for the UI), so everything slower is laggy for me. I worked for Motorola before (as a contractor) doing integration and solving bugs for Latin America releases (sometimes Canada also) and I used Motorola XOOM, XOOM 2 and XOOM 2 ME a lot. When I worked there, the tablets ran Honeycomb. Motorola XOOM felt very responsive, but XOOM 2 was a little laggy (worse than first generation XOOM), although way more beautiful, thinner and, of course, lighter. So, I sticked to my iPad until now. Not that my tablet is starting to show it’s age, I’m really considering buying the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. It doesn’t feature a super resolution as Nexus 10 (or even 3rd and 4th generation iPad), but it’s not unpleasant to look at, the design is good enough and, what won me, it has a pen. What? A stylus? Jobs said “from the moment you need a stylus, you’re doomed,” don’t you agree? Indeed, I agree. But notice he said “need” and this tablet does not need it. You can perfectly use it without the pen. But have you tried to draw something with your fingers or those fat point pen for capacitive screens? It’s terrible. Galaxy Note 10.1 has the best of both worlds. It’s practical to use your fingers for day to day operation and the stylus when precision is required.
The hackathon and my app
The requirement for the hackathon was an app that could run on Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, although it didn’t need to require special features of the tablet. Bonus point for using it, but it could be even a web app. In college, I tried to take notes using Cornell note-taking system, and this was our app. The fun part was in programming the main area. We decided to let the user draw with the finger or S-Pen, so it was a big canvas. There should be a way to put some text (typing) for long text notes (handwriting isn’t good at tablets). It should allow zoom to achieve better precision. And it should synchronize with Evernote. For the canvas with textedit I decided to develop a custom component, but I needed to remember a lot of things. Fortunately, Chiuki, from Square Island has a series of talks on Android custom components. I skimmed through that one and Deep Dive into Android Custom Components to get an idea. In the end, I realized it wouldn’t be possible to make the component and format the note (remember, it should synchronize with Evernote), so I just implemented the drawing part. The code is so ugly and full of hacks I won’t publish it right now, but I plan to clean it a little (it’s holiday in Brazil on Thursday) and publish it on github.
Peopleware
The best part of the hackathon was meeting with awesome people. I already told about Luis Samra and Julien Boedec. Also, I talked a lot with Ty Smith and Seth Hitchings. I hadn’t interacted much with Lindsey Smith, but when I needed her opinion on my UI, she was very supportive (in fact, this was very common, all Evernote staff was very supportive and knowledgeable, I would hire all of them if I had the chance ;) ). In previous Hackathons I took part at, there were nice people also, but in this one the availabilty of them were at another level. I didn’t remember a time when I saw the staff slacking. Every time they’re walking by and asking us if everything was alright and if we needed help. Very nice.
Finally, the surprise was meeting Ana Carolina Merighe, who studied at Unicamp too, and Bruno Mazzoco, from Samsung, who also worked at Eldorado Research Institute (my former employer).
Conclusion
It was an awesome experience and I’ll do it again next year. Hackathons are great to meet smart people and get fresh ideas.
Edit: clarified Peopleware section